How I Got Back Into Reading After Years Away

There were a few years where I didn’t read at all. Not a slump but a full stop. The kid who buddy-read Agatha Christie with her dad at seven, who binged Jules Verne at nine, who saved up to buy a book on release day at thirteen, that girl just stopped. For years.

If you’ve ever loved reading and then lost it, whether to burnout, to a busy life, to a stretch where books felt like one more thing you didn’t have time for, I want to share a part of my bookish life and tell you how I got back into reading. Because I did, all the way back, and the road there wasn’t what I expected. It ran straight through audiobooks, a sparkly vampire, and eventually the entire romance genre I’d sworn it wasn’t for me. This is the long way around to becoming the reader I am now.

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It started with my dad

My parents were both readers, so I became one early on, but not anywhere near where I’d end up. When I was seven, my dad and I were buddy-reading non fiction like In the Name of God by David Yallop and working our way through Agatha Christie together. Not exactly standard second grade material, but nobody told me that, so I just kept going.

The book I hold closest from back then is Ami: El Niño de las Estrellas by Enrique Barrios, a little trilogy about a boy from the stars that makes a human friend that I was completely consumed by. I didn’t have the word for it yet, but looking back, that was probably the first seed of everything paranormal and otherworldly I’d fall for later.

After my dad passed, I found my own way through it the way I’d watched him do it: I read. I was nine, binge-reading Jules Verne entirely for myself, no school assignment in sight. From the Earth to the Moon is still one of my favorite books in the world, and it always will be, for reasons that have very little to do with the moon.

By thirteen, I was probably the only kid buying Only Love Is Real by Brian Weiss the day it came out and reading the whole thing in one sitting. Soulmates, past lives, two people fated to find each other. I’ve thought a lot since about whether that was my first real taste of the fated mates pull I’d chase for the rest of my reading life. I think it was.

A ’90s kid raised on obsession

I grew up in Panama, but I was steeped in everything that marked elder millennial culture: Titanic, the Backstreet Boys, Buffy, Felicity, Dawson’s Creek, 10 Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions. I didn’t do things halfway. If I loved something, I loved it loudly and completely, and that’s a trait that turned out to matter more than my teenage self realized.

School reading in Panama meant Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, and I’m grateful for it, but for one English class I got to choose, and I picked Pride and Prejudice purely as an excuse to read it for credit. Then I watched the BBC miniseries on a loop. Colin Firth has been my Mr. Darcy ever since, and no adaptation since has come close to unseating him.

Then Interview with the Vampire hit the screen and I went all the way down that rabbit hole. I became a full on Anne Rice scholar. I read everything she wrote, including the books she published as Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure. By the time the movie Queen of the Damned came around, I was obsessed with vampires, gothic atmosphere, the whole beautiful, doomed mood of it. New Orleans became a bucket list destination for me, and I finally got to visit in 2014. Yes, it was everything I wanted. If you came to immortals the way I did, I’ve put together a list of books like Interview with the Vampire that scratch the exact same itch.

How romance found me (and then lost me)

I didn’t read a romance novel on purpose until I moved to the US at nineteen and discovered something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks: Harlequin would mail romance novels to your house. I’d never had mail delivered to a home address before that point in my life, so the idea of a box of books just showing up was borderline magical.

I devoured category romance. I was there for the launch of the Blaze line, and I spent real time on the old Harlequin website forums talking to other readers and trading recommendations which, in hindsight, was my first taste of the book community that would eventually become my whole life. For about a year I read everything I could get my hands on.

And then I burned out. Hard. When you read forty interchangeable category romances a month back to back, the seams start to show, and I hit a wall where every book felt like the same book with the names swapped. So I went cold turkey on romance and said this isn’t for me. What I didn’t expect was that I’d go cold turkey on reading altogether. But that’s what happened.

The years I didn’t read

For several years, I just didn’t. Life got busy in the way life does, and reading quietly fell off the list. And the longer it was gone, the more impossible it felt to start again.

That’s the part I most want to say to anyone in the same place right now, because I think it’s the part nobody admits: losing reading doesn’t always feel like a dramatic breakup. Mostly it feels like nothing. You don’t decide to stop. You just look up one day and realize it’s been a year, then two, and the books are still sitting there, and you’ve quietly started thinking of yourself as someone who used to read.

I genuinely thought that was who I was at that point. I was wrong but I didn’t know it yet.

How I finally got back into reading

The thing that cracked it open was, of all things, the Twilight craze. Back before the movie came out, when it was still spreading by word of mouth. Something about the noise around it made me want to read a vampire book. The problem was time: I didn’t have a quiet hour to sit down with a book (ebooks were not really a thing), and that was the whole reason I’d drifted in the first place.

So I tried an audiobook. And that was the game changer.

I could read again! While I commuted, while I cleaned, while I did the hundred things that had crowded books out of my life. For at least three years, audiobooks were my only form of reading, and I have zero shame about that. If you’re trying to get back into reading and you keep failing to find the time, this is the single most useful thing I can tell you: the format makes a difference. And all of it counts.

I started with Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, and my whole heart came back online. From there I fell straight down the urban fantasy rabbit hole. Yes, I read Twilight (Eclipse had just dropped), Kim Harrison, Vampire Academy, Vampire Diaries, Carrie Vaughn. I couldn’t get them into my ears fast enough. If urban fantasy is where you want to start too, my genre guides break down where to begin without the overwhelm.

The books that turned me into a romance reader

Here’s the irony: I came back to reading through paranormal and urban fantasy specifically because I was still avoiding romance. I’d been burned, and I steered hard around anything with a couple on the cover.

But I started running out of urban fantasy I could find on audio, so I let myself dip a toe into paranormal romance. And that was it, I was hooked all over again. Contemporary was a much bigger ask; that genre had burned me. The book that finally broke through was Broken by Megan Hart, and I still remember the shock of it. This didn’t read like a category romance where I could swap the names and feel nothing. This made me feel things and showed me that contemporary romance could do more.

Historical was the last wall to come down for me, and I resisted it the longest. Too much fuss, I assumed, too many ballrooms, and too many customs and traditions that felt foreign to me. Then I read Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas, and that was the end of the argument. Kleypas has had a permanent place on my shelf ever since, and she’s the reason I’ll defend historical romance to anyone who’ll stand still long enough.

Finding my people

The whole time, I was logging what I read online. I learned from my Harlequin days that I couldn’t remember a single book I read from back then. So I logged first on a little reading feature on Facebook, then on Goodreads when I found it in the late 2000s, back when it was genuinely about community and nothing like what it is now. That’s where I found my people: a group of women of every age who loved the same books I did and kept handing me new ones. We talked about books constantly, recommended endlessly, and basically built each other’s TBRs and friendships that would last a lifetime.

By 2011, everyone seemed to be starting a blog. I resisted at first for the same old reason, no time. But four of us decided to do it anyway. We launched Under the Covers Book Blog and kept our names and faces a secret for years, just readers behind a shared love of the genre.

And diving in headfirst came naturally, because I’d always been someone who loved things all the way. The same kid who lived inside Anne Rice and Pride and Prejudice now lived inside Night Huntress, Immortals After Dark, Black Dagger Brotherhood, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson. These weren’t series I read. They were series I moved into.

Where I landed

I read across every corner of romance now. Paranormal and urban fantasy will always be home, but historical, dark, and fantasy all get heavy rotation, and yes, I came all the way back around to contemporary too once in a while. The reader who’d quietly decided she “used to read” turned out to be very wrong about that.

If you’re somewhere in the part of the story where the books are sitting there untouched, here’s what mine taught me: reading isn’t a race, the way back doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, and the format you come back through, whether audio, ebook, a battered paperback you pick up at a used bookstore, does not matter one bit. Follow whatever hooks you. Mine happened to be a sexy vampire, and I’d do it again.

When you’re ready to find your next one, try your hand at Romanceopoly. It’s the reading challenge I created to help you get a gentle nudge out of your usual lane and discover a new love while having fun at it too. Come find something good.

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